Strategic awareness deals with determining planning objectives, organising planning team(s) and obtaining top management commitment. This phase is especially important because it influences the scheduling and carrying out of the activities in the other phases. Autonomy for this phase would increase the experienced meaningfulness and responsibility for not only itself, but also those later activities. Autonomy for it would further increase subsidiary managers’ knowledge about the actual results of the phase itself (i.e. the nature of the objectives, the rationale for the choices of the members of the teams and the extent of top management commitment). As a result, autonomy would increase subsidiary managers’ sense of satisfaction in terms of feeling they are treated fairly.